Travel Day.

So I'm at the fabulous Newark Airport now, recently renamed "Liberty" Airport because "Newark" is, like, such a drag. (Not that it always was; recall the Newark of Philip Roth. Recall "Trenton Makes, The World Takes." New Jersey, my beloved home state. What storied and tragic histories its cities have.) I'm way early for my flight to Salt Lake City. I'm getting a bite at O'Brien's faux Irish Pub (the chicken strips aren't half bad) and dipping into my airplane reading: Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews by Donald Barthelme, a writer I enjoy so much that I've only been reading him very very piecemeal over the past twenty-seven years or so because I don't want to run out. Right now I'm looking at a partial transcription of a panel discussion D.B. did with Walker Percy, Grace Paley and William Gass in Glasgow in 1975. Here's Gass:

"...I think we ought to abandon truth as an ideal as artists. I think it's pernicious. I think it gets in the way all the time. That sounds sort of odd to some people but actually you'd say that to a mathematician. Mathematicians aren't interested in truth, they're interested in formal coherence..."

Percy, as you might expect, demurs: "It's hard for me to imagine any novelist not being motivated by some desire to approach some kind of truth..." Barthelme parries: "...when you are writing you are invariably making statement of some kind or another, however much you may strain to avoid doing so..." Gass, God bless him, responds, "I don't think they are statements; they look like statements" and goes on delightfully: "Yeats is a great statement poet. The fact that most of the statements he made aren't true, if you were to translate them into intelligible statements, doesn't matter."

Expect this kind of particularity of intellectual rigor in my Sundance coverage, folks.

A little later, the boys (poor Grace Paley has barely been able to get a word in edgewise, and what she offers is, well, Paley-esque) gang up Alain Robbe Grillet, whom Gass calls "far too old fashioned." I read these observations with some upset, as one of the things I wasn't able to get myself together to do before heading off to Sundance was write up Last Year At Marienbad, a gorgeous restored print of which opens Friday at Film Forum and then goes on to tour the country. Mark Harris had a good piece in last Sunday's Times on the collaboration between mise-en-scene master Alain Resnais and then-hot "new novelist" Robbe Grillet, but I wanted to get into the picture from the perspective of game theory and the idea of pastiche without an actual source, and didn't much have the time. One thing I've always loved about the film is how, once its plot elements are introduced—obsessed, possibly mad would-be lover, prevaricating object of love, detached husband, all inhabiting a series of glacial settings—the film becomes a beguiling simulacurum of something that, of course, it cannot be: a self-generating system.

Alas, I can't really get into it now. Maybe when the DVD comes out. But in the meantime, do see this picture. I'll be wishing I was seeing it with you quite frequently, I reckon...

Comments

[Ryland Walker Knight]

I should really try to read some more Barthelme. The first go-round was not quite a success for me; it puzzled me more than Borges, but with less wit. I know it's an odd reaction. The friend who gave me _60 short stories_, as expected, prefers DB to JLB precisely because he thinks DB has more wit. I don't have an argument for my side right now. Maybe later. (Matter of fact, that would have been a cool Honors Thesis, right? Too bad (nah) that I'm already ensconced in another project.) And apparently I need to get on the William Gass tip. That dude kills it. Or he does in those passages you quote.

G'luck in the snow. Maybe you can discover the next gotta-hate-it quirk comedy and get the blogosphere hate wheel spinning? Or maybe you can take a lot of sweet PhotoBooth pix with sweet celebs, like, uh, Rip Torn?

(Did you like XX-XY? (Terrible title, yes, but Marc Ruffalo is so good I couldn't help but like it.) That director's got a new movie there in Utah and Rip Torn is in it, along with Josh Hartnett, Naomie Harris, Robin Tunney, and -- yes, that's him, the man who fell to earth -- David Bowie.)

[Chad Channing]

I dare you to read every page of the The Tunnel. Gass is an apt name. Gass makes Gaddis seem like Elmore Leonard. Gass is the great modern philosopher of literature, but as a writer, a storyteller, a stylist, his lack of concern for the reader turns me off. I'd rather read Elkin, who can write a sentence as good as Gass, but also managers to squeeze just the right amount of feeling onto the pages. Elkin's Magic Kingdom is black as anti-matter, just like all of Gass' gas, but at least there is humor. Gass was built to be a writer, some of his essays are wonderfully dense, but they forgot to install something very important within him before they rolled him off the assembly line. They forgot to give him a soul.

[bill]

I've been thinking about finally tackling "The Tunnel", and I did enjoy those qoutes above. Right now, however, I'm reading Patricia Highsmith, and something tells me that even if I managed to finish "The Tunnel" I will ultimately be more impressed with Highsmith.

I tried reading "The Magic Kingdom" many years ago, when I was a teenager. I was probably too young, but I also remember being put-off by the very calculated (or so it seemed to me) strangeness of the characters. I do want to give it another whirl one of these days.

[Tess]

I think I'm falling in love with Chad Channing. No joke.